Margaret Thatcher: Herself Alone

Journalist Moore (Margaret Thatcher: At Her Zenith) depicts the final decades of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s life, including her third consecutive general election victory in 1987 and the intraparty discord that led to her ouster as Conservative Party leader in 1990, in this impressive conclusion to his multivolume authorized biography. Moore presents Thatcher’s last years in power thematically, analyzing the prime minister’s beliefs and actions on the AIDS crisis; climate change (according to Moore, Thatcher did “more than any other non-American to encourage the United States towards a global, well-funded approach to climate change”); the democratization of the Soviet Union and the reunification of Germany; the poll tax; and the debate over England’s entry into the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, among other issues. Though Moore handily dissects these political matters, his narrative structure occasionally obfuscates their interdependence as well as the wobbly nature of Thatcher’s popularity at the time. The chapters depicting her fall from power, however, are expertly wrought. Moore concludes with a portrait of Thatcher’s long health decline in her post–Downing Street years. Drawing on primary historical documents as well as firsthand interviews with key players in Thatcher’s personal and political lives, Moore delivers a frank and weighty testament to the impact of a stateswoman whose “vices were inseparable from her virtues.” (Nov.)